Philly once came ever so close to landing the Super Bowl, but lost out in overtime

Long before Doug Pederson and Nick Foles and the “Philly Special,” the city almost pulled off an ultimate surprise play.

After it had snowed on 12 of the first 18 days he was in office, Mayor W. Wilson Goode went for it all in January 1984 by declaring that the city was going to bid on Super Bowl XXI, scheduled for Jan. 25, 1987. Don Quixote does South Philly?

Amazingly, the city, with assists from Eagles owner Leonard Tose — who later would threaten to move the team to Arizona — was stopped short of the goal line.

Voting that May, after 12 ballots no candidate was able to secure the 21 votes from 28 team owners. On the 13th ballot, the league waived the rule and Pasadena won by a majority. Philadelphia came in second, Commissioner Pete Rozelle announced.

Pasadena over Philly in January? What were they thinking? Didn’t they know that it snowed out there in January 1932, setting off a snowball ”riot” the led to multiple arrests?

Goode said he believed that the Super Bowl selection process was unfair to NFL cities outside the U.S. banana belts and that he was ready to challenge that tradition.

“We had a shot and lost,” the 84-year-old Goode recalled last week. “I was disappointed, but not overly so because there was no expectation.”

It also might well have been the city’s last shot.

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The weather certainly was an issue, but Goode held that Philly’s in January was similar to San Francisco’s. He never claimed to be a climatologist: San Francisco’s average January temperature is about 20 degrees higher than Philly’s, its average January snowfall, 0.0.

But what’s a few degrees of separation between coasts? The city blitzed the 28 team owners with a 6½-minute film extolling Philly’s assets, and how did you guess that it included the Rocky theme.

As the film begins, the announcer proclaims: “Philadelphia has the dynamic force of a champion, and you can expect championship treatment from a city that will pull out all the stops for Super Bowl XXI.”

Historic and cultural sites. Shopping areas that “provide a wide variety of stores.” Hotels that “sparkle with elegance.” Restaurants that have made the city “a mecca of superb dining.” All the candy. What else could a visitor want?

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The city’s proposal also included free hotel rooms for the 28 teams’ owners, chauffeured limousines, police escorts, personal aides, and $500,000 to spend on a party if they are in Philadelphia, all at a cost of about $6.4 million in today’s money.

That might sound lavish, but Goode said it was paid for with private money. Besides, he said, the Super Bowl bid specifications included quite a generous helping of perks for the league and the NFL, which in turn assured the host city that it ultimately would come out the winner.

The NFL is secretive about what it demands from aspiring host cities. “We are unable to provide details of specific bid proposals,” said NFL spokeswoman Elissa Dotzman.

However, in advance of the Eagles’ only Super Bowl victory five years ago in a game played in Minnesota, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune posted the NFL’s 153-page bid document. In spelling out the “minimum specifications,” it reads somewhat like a manifesto for declaring economic martial law.

“The NFL wasn’t very happy about getting that leaked,” said Victor A. Matheson, a sports-finance specialist at College of the Holy Cross, in Massachusetts, who has written extensively about Super Bowl economics.

Here are a few excerpts.

Matheson said that although it is not known whether Minneapolis agreed to them all, the list, itself, betrays a “level of arrogance.”

The Super Bowl “is the single largest sporting event in the United States, by far,” Matheson said, but it’s not quite the economic over-driver that the NFL portrays. He estimates it generates about $100 million to $150 million in local economic benefits, a quarter to a third of what the NFL estimates.

The local hosts will have to put up $30 million to $50 million, so it would be a net gain.

However, he said, the NFL uses the bidding process to encourage teams to build new stadiums, which are becoming ever more expensive. A Super Bowl is not going to pay for a $1.5 billion or $2 billion stadium, he said. Based on an analysis he completed last week, the public subsidizes nearly half of the costs of new sports stadiums and arenas.

For a city to have a shot at hosting a Super Bowl in any cold-weather area, it would have to have a weatherproof stadium. “There’s no chance Philadelphia gets the game, ever, unless they have a new domed stadium,” said Matheson, adding that the NFL is “not leaving any aspect of that game to chance.”

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He said that a Super Bowl would not be worth the cost of building such a stadium, and Eagles officials in the past have expressed reservations. Besides, Matheson agreed, football under a roof wouldn’t be a prototypical “Philly thing.”

The only Super Bowl held in the open air in the Northeast was the one in 2014 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., but Matheson said that was an NFL thank-you note for the Giants agreeing to build a $1.6 billion stadium.

Speaking of the Giants, they beat the Denver Broncos in that 1987 Super Bowl in Pasadena, where the high that day was 74. It was 66 in San Francisco, the warmest day of the month.

In Philly, it was 20, snowing during the second half, and the wind chill was zero.